Veteran
by Acey Dearest
Summary: AU, but then you never know with Erek King. Erek reminisces about his time, what he did, and what others did during the end of the Civil War as an army doctor.
1. Lieutenant

"Veteran" by Acey   
  
Disclaimer: I don't own the Animorphs, nor am I making any money off of this, blah, blah, blah, it's K.A. Applegate's... you should know by now that I don't own much worth owning.  
  
Author's Note: Loony Lovegood, after about a quarter of a million revisions, here is the Animorphs fic you requested (a.k.a. the result of me borrowing almost every book on the shelf on the Civil War, then, after finding all needed information, staring at her computer in agony, wondering why in the heck she chose that topic anyway, and how in the heck she could make a decent, unboring [I'm calling that a word now] story out of it).   
  
The bell rang. History class 101. The teacher's topic, the Civil War.  
Also known as the War Between the States, or, for a long time, simply the War, before the two World Wars and the Korean and the Vietnam served their purpose and drowned that name into oblivion, along with hundreds of thousands of militia.  
Names on a wall now, carved in stone in Washington, D.C. Cold marble monuments to a dozen conflicts, more erected every year, soldiers on horseback, soldiers standing, soldiers in every position, looking as dead as corpses no matter the detail the artists put into those statues. Dead, and forgotten.  
"Turn to page two forty," the teacher says, watching as a couple of kids play football with folded up sheets of loose-leaf paper and tells them to stop before she continues.   
"Now, picking up from yesterday, we just finished studying about Gettysburg. Who still remembers any of the details concerning that battle?"  
Silence.  
"Anyone at all?"  
More bored silence. History would repeat itself no matter how the teachers taught the lessons, that much can be deduced easily enough, quickly enough.  
Unfortunately enough.  
"Well, then," she says, sounding defeated, "it looks like no one bothered paying any attention. Pickett's Charge-- anyone remember Pickett's Charge?"  
The answer's obvious; it's on the page. I let someone else answer for me. Sometimes I wonder why I bother even stepping into this history classroom full of posters and timelines and reports, when I lived it all, if you could call me alive, more than any supposed vampire in legend, and cursed even worse than one.   
Doomed to see it all and barely be able to do a thing in the universe about what happens. Charmed life, being an android. Charmed.  
"Yes, good," says the teacher to whoever answered. "Very good. Now, we're going to skip a few months during this lesson, and turn our thoughts to Sherman's March to the Sea."  
She's getting into her element now, which means that at least three people will be asleep by the time class is over.  
"Okay, then. You see General Sherman's picture on the next page. Read for me... let's see, Marco."  
She did that intentionally. I don't know which class Marco tends to pay the least attention in, history or math.  
He quickly turned to the page a full four minutes behind everyone else and started. I'd like to tune him out, but this is a new textbook, and I half want to know how the current edition of Project Rewrite History goes.  
"Sherman's main objective was to..."  
It's almost the same as the last textbook's interpretation. I wait to see if they remembered, bitter, caustic, to add any of the general's quotes.  
"He said he would 'make Georgia howl,' and upon the capture of Savannah, in December, 1864, asked to give it to Lincoln as a Christmas present. Atlanta had fallen before Savannah, and its railroads were torn to make them unfit for use by either army."  
No kidding.   
Odd how war is so full of if onlys that are talked about afterwards, puzzled over. Any war, take your pick. I could list them for you, in chronological order, even, if you'd like. I could tell you about the fall of the Roman Empire just as easily as the battle of Waterloo. Vietnam? I wasn't a hippie, if that was what you're wondering, not even when it was fashionable. I didn't help with the pyramids to stand around doing nothing but flash the peace sign centuries later. The Chee aren't like that.  
I could see where the history lesson was going. To the teacher I would just be Erek King, yet another bored-out-of-his-wits student, watching the clock hands move at their sluggish rate, wishing I was doing anything but being forced to listen to her hour-long lecture.  
She'd never realize that what I really was thinking about pertained perfectly to the day's lesson.  
  
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If all Georgia Septembers were like the one in 1864, I seriously doubt too many people would be living there now. It was hot, muggy, miserable. The only rain the fields got that year was the rain of cannons, and that didn't help King Cotton much. Not like there was much of the fiber being shipped. The blockades were finally doing their job, or so I heard.  
I was on the right side of things that go-around, lived in New York before the war. I was one of the doctors, Union Army. I looked too young to really be a doctor, and they would have refused me and tried to put me in as a foot soldier if I hadn't enlisted early on, before they needed quite as many military personnel. But an army does need a large handful of doctors in the wake of battle, more than it has, really, and I suppose they thought I'd do. Sherman's division suffered heavy casualties that summer and early fall (if you could call it that-- like I said, Georgia was a misery that September), and we were constantly on call.  
Sad. There wasn't very much the doctors could do to a point. They've said in the history books how even though there were drugs avaliable back then, there weren't many people that were trained to give them. At any rate, medicine was light-years behind the way it is nowadays here-- if you were shot in the right place, chances were you'd become an amputee, provided the bullet wasn't to your head.  
"Doc?"  
"Sir?" I said, pouring some water over what passed for medical instruments.  
I knew that man by looks only. He was a first lieutenant, and he had a brutally thin mustache that was probably meant to divert attention from the fact that he had a receding hairline.  
"Didn't know if you knew, but Atlanta fell today."  
I nodded like I had never heard the news. He wasn't the first to tell me so; most of the friends of the wounded had announced it as they took their comrades over to the operation table, like I didn't have eyes to see the fact that we were penetrating the Southern lines.  
"That's good."  
"Sure is, Doc, sure is. We'll lick 'em yet! Took us awhile, but no traitors like them Rebs stand a chance against the United States! Now that we've got the railroad--"  
I barely listened to him as I finished cleaning a scalpel. A nod of the head here and there, however, seemed to suffice for the lieutenant.  
"Yes sir, we've got them in a corner. Atlanta's a big town. Get their supplies from there, the Rebels, things like that. Would you believe that they didn't even bother to get people outta that town until yesterday? Makes you wonder.There's still--"  
I wondered if he had come to the tent for any reason other than to boast about the campaign's success like it had been his single-handedly.  
"Oh, oh, yeah, well, just wanted to let you know we're gonna stay here for the winter, part of it, anyway. One of the captains told me. Soon's they evacuate the town, of course."  
"I thought you said that they evacuated--"  
"Naw, there's still some left. Not too many, though, but there you have it, Doc. See you tommorow, then."  
"Don't get shot and I won't," I said dryly, watching him depart, and he chuckled good-naturedly under his breath. Years of war had not damaged his sense of humor. "Goodbye, Lieutenant."  
  
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Acey: Don't think I'm done yet. Unless I slap a big "finis" at the end of a chapter, I am far from done.   
  
  
  
Acey: Special thanks goes to Loony Lovegood for getting me to stray from my usual DBZ fics and into this one. I had a lot of fun writing this (not so much fun researching it out-- and if I messed up anywhere, please tell me), and I hope, as always, that you enjoyed reading this. 


	2. Drummer

"Veteran" by Acey  
  
Disclaimer: -_- And I've been here how long, and I still have to write it? =P Animorphs is not mine. Be glad.  
  
Apology: I am very sorry about the incredibly long wait. It was far from fair of me. Far.   
  
  
The next day came, hotter, muggy still. More fighting over a town we already had won. And every doctor/surgeon avaliable was involved in more than he could handle -- of trying to bandage wounds, of administering quinine if he had enough left since the last shipment of supplies, or blue mass. And amputations.  
"McCrat," one of the surgeon's assistants, Henry Kimball, said to me. The regular officers were far from the only ones who remembered that I not only had a title but a name as well. Those working with the sick knew my name (my last name at any rate), and referred to me as such, but the officers called me "Doc," and that was it. Perhaps because there weren't that many of us.  
"Henry."  
He said nothing at first and jerked his head down. I followed the direction of it, and noticed the first lieutenant I had spoken to the day before, a detail, apparently, sitting another man on the operating table, eyes downcast, opening his knapsack for such dressings as he had been issued. No smile was on his face today, no whistling of a partially merry but longing tune, longing for an end to this war, the victory over the rebels that so seemingly should've been won years before. The mustached lieutenant was saying a prayer.  
No, a hymn. He pushed his brown hair back as he half-whispered it, "Amazing Grace," possibly.  
Then I saw the man now on the operating table, suddenly realizing with a sickened horror why no one was looking directly at him.  
His leg had been shot into pieces by a cannonball, the crimson plasma from the wound mixing in with what was already there. His small, frecked face was sunburned from so many hours, so many weeks spent on marches. He was young, probably only a drummer boy. His height had probably been the only thing that had passed him to volunteer as a soldier.  
Henry looked at me, an expression of mixed sadness and expectancy. Like "you're the doctor here. I'll help you, but you know you're the doctor here."  
Silence, silence from the healthy but the moans of the dying and afflicted everywhere else, including from the drummer boy. Delirious groans, sighs of the feverish. Most of the ones with fever that had had it for much longer a duration than a day would not make it. They called for loved ones, sweethearts, mothers, and some died thinking they'd found them, in peace.  
I opened my kit of medical instruments, selecting one, instructing Henry to see if he could get anything of alcohol for the drummer. He came back with some brandy a little later, half a bottle of it, and morphine.  
I tried to comfort the drummer and...  
  
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Henry said nothing more as the day dragged on. Nor did the lieutenant or any of the rest of the details as they carried more of the wounded toward us, nothing but an occasional say of who the man was that had been hurt if they knew, so we could send a definite letter to his family if he had died.  
We sent one to the mother of the drummer boy that day. I never knew how many other sons she had sent to war. It passed over the agony of his last moments as we tried to save him and his raging fever, and focused instead on his valiance on the field, as a soldier had seen it. He had stopped drumming the cadence under orders to and had taken up a gun from a fallen soldier, shooting until he too fell. In his duty to country, the brave boy had sacrificed his life in war.   
There were no other letters to send that day, which I was grateful for. The fighting had slacked. I knew that we had Atlanta -- had it, no more battling over it -- now. Henry, as unobservant as he was, knew it, too. The mustached lieutenant had probably known the factt since he told me that we won it the day previous, something that I had found out was only a day off. Today we officially had Atlanta. The day before we had come close.  
The bloodshed over the Southern city, so essential to the Rebel Cause, had ended. I didn't know what else would -- what else could, lie ahead.  
  
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End file.
